Book Image

WordPress MU 2.8: Beginner's Guide

Book Image

WordPress MU 2.8: Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

WordPress MU enables you to build a complete, professional blog network. Each user gets their own blog, and can choose their favorite templates and plug-ins, and develop their own content. WordPress MU powers some of the largest blog networks in the world, including the mighty WordPress.com ñ home to thousands of bloggers. This book will take you through the setup of a WordPress MU-powered blogging network, using a real, working blog network as an example, so that you can follow the creation process step-by-step. Your blogging network will be complete with professional features such as friends lists, status feeds, groups, forums, photo galleries, and more, to build your own WordPress.com ñ a place where users can quickly come and create a blog for themselves. The book starts with a clean install of WordPress MU, and as you work through the book, you will build the blog network, and add on more and more features, all seamlessly integrated to achieve a professional, custom-built look.You will find new themes and plug-ins added to the site, as well as customization of the WordPress multi-user code. The book will also look at ways you can manage your community, and keep your site safe and secure, ensuring that it is a spam-free, enjoyable community for your users. In the later chapters, you will add a forum using the bbPress script, and add BuddyPress social networking components to your site. Imagine how good you'll feel when your first WordPress multi-user blog network launches.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
WordPress MU 2.8 Beginner’s Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Server side optimizations


Optimizing Apache, PHP, and MySQL is beyond the scope of this book, but if you are expecting large amounts of traffic or simply want to squeeze as much power as possible out of your existing server setup, then the topic is worth investigating.

Many webmasters have found that using lighttpd or nginx instead of Apache offers a performance boost. Also, tweaking the settings for MySQL and PHP may help you. If you need advice about how to do this, I would recommend contacting your web host.

Some tweaks are possible only on a VPS hosting plan or better. It is possible to run WordPress MU and BuddyPress on a shared hosting plan; however, if you find yourself hitting the limits of such a plan, the best option is to upgrade to a VPS. If you have difficulty on a smaller VPS plan (for example, 256MB RAM), again an upgrade may be the easiest fix. However, for plans bigger than that, you can most likely earn yourself some headroom by optimizing the server's setup.

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